


Nothin’ Says Lovin’ Like Somethin’ from the Oven

by rabidchild67



Series: Five Times... [20]
Category: White Collar
Genre: Baking, Multi, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-19
Updated: 2013-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-26 02:08:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/645376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidchild67/pseuds/rabidchild67
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>OK, so baking isn’t one of Peter’s strong suits…</p><p>Originally written for St. Patrick's Day, 2012.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothin’ Says Lovin’ Like Somethin’ from the Oven

Peter stared at the recipe El had given him, eyebrows knit together. The ingredients were straightforward, the instructions clearly typed. He could do this – how hard could it be?

He’d decided he wanted to do something special for Neal, and since it was nearly St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday that [ held special memories ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/644357) for Neal from childhood, he and El had decided to host a dinner party in his honor, with corned beef, cabbage, and all the trimmings. The party was going to be that night, and since El had so many errands to run on top of cooking everything, Peter had volunteered to make the soda bread – from Neal's Irish grandmother’s recipe.

And so here Peter stood in the kitchen, an array of ingredients around him – flour, butter, sugar – a few bowls and measuring cups, and he wasn’t quite sure how to start.

“Come on, Burke, it’s a simple recipe – you can do this,” he muttered and grabbed the canister of flour.

He lifted off the top and grabbed a measuring cup, dipping it into the flour. As he did, the air displaced by the flour caused it to shoot out all over his shirt. Sighing, he went in search of an apron to guard against future messes. The only one he could find was the jokey one he’d bought El years before that featured a shapely, bikini-clad body on its front. Saying a prayer that Neal wouldn’t get home any time soon, he threw it on and went back to measuring. 

Once the flour was measured, he put in the salt, sugar, baking soda. 

_Cut the butter into the flour._ He read. “Cut the butter into the flour?” He looked at the two sticks of butter and the bowl full of dry ingredients and didn’t see how that was possible. Glancing up at the knife block on the back counter, he went over and took out the biggest knife he could find. He then unwrapped the butter and plopped it into the bowl with the dry ingredients. Picking the knife up, he tried to push it through the butter, but it only slid around the bowl. 

“Huh.” He reached into the bowl and grabbed the thing, cutting at it awkwardly, but it squished through his fingers. Convinced he’d done something wrong, he inspected the recipe again. “The size of small peas?” He looked down on the bowl and raised an eyebrow – how was he going to reduce the now roughly one dozen chunks of butter to the size of peas? 

He spotted the cheese grater in the drainboard and grabbed it. Mashing all the butter into a floury mass, he ran it over the large holes, watching as small chunks fell out of the bottom. When he was done, he took a look at his handiwork and nodded with satisfaction – so, maybe these were really small peas, but they’d pass.

“Beat egg into milk, stir in, mix with other ingredients,” he read. “OK.” He cracked the egg into a bowl, dumped the buttermilk in and grabbed a whisk. Five minutes of beating later, the mixture was frothy and he thought he liked the result. He poured it into the bowl with the flour and things, grabbed a wooden spoon and stirred. Some of the milk sloshed out over the sides, so he swiped it down the counter into his hand and dumped it back into the bowl.

The ingredients were now most definitely a dough – that was where bread came from, he was certain of it – but the spoon he was using was getting increasingly difficult to push through it. 

“Knead on floured board,” he read aloud. He glanced around the kitchen and didn’t spot any boards. This was a challenge – he had never in his long relationship with El or Neal – both of them terrific cooks – heard them refer to a “board” in any way whatsoever. He looked at the mess on the counter, then at the bowl, then at the canister of flour. Shrugging, he turned the bowl upside down over on the counter – spotting a few spilled coffee grinds and bagel crumbs from breakfast that morning too late – and scraped all of the sticky dough out of the bowl.

“OK, kneading. I can knead. What’s kneading?” Images of big burly bakers throwing dough around on the Food Network entered his mind and he looked down at the amorphous mass of dough before him. It looked like a dog’s breakfast, with wet clumps lying in a pile of almost completely dry ingredients. He pushed the fingers of his right hand into it experimentally, and it stuck to them. When he pulled his hand out, it was coated in the thick goo. 

“Huh.” He pushed at it a little more, picking some up from the bottom and flipping it over the top. This seemed to be a decent way to get everything to come together, so he did that for a few minutes. Eventually, the dough seemed to be coming together – even if it was sticking to the counter like it was merging with it. He raked his fingers through it, trying to gather it up, though it didn’t really work, leaving sticky, finger-shaped channels on the counter top. Spotting the knife he’d discarded earlier, he used it to scrape the dough together, the knife making _sk-sk-skitching_ sounds on the counter’s surface.

“Shape into two loaves,” he read out. He still had the knife in his hand, so he cut the blob of dough in half and plopped half of it onto a cookie sheet, then the other one beside it. Feeling immensely proud of himself, he began to pile utensils and butter wrappers into the mixing bowl when he spotted the raisins sitting innocuously in a tiny bowl off to the side. “Crap,” he muttered – he’d forgotten to put them into the dough. He picked them up and began to press them into the dough with his fingertips, shoving the raisins as far into the interior as he could, trying to get them into the bread without having to do any more kneading. It was slow work and he was about half done when he gave it up for a bad job and sprinkled the rest over the top.

“Bake in preheated 400 degree oven,” he read. “Crap.” He’d forgotten to heat the oven. Shrugging, he turned the oven on and put the sheet of bread in – it’d get to 400 eventually, he reasoned. Setting the timer on the oven, he went to clean up the mess he’d made, quickly discovering the side effects when a lot of water meets a lot of flour that has been spilled onto a counter. 

40 minutes later, the timer dinged as Peter was finishing up the dishes – the time had sped by. He removed the breads and set them on the stove top. He finished the dishes, then grabbed a turner to move the breads to the wire racks that it had taken him ten minutes to find earlier. The bread had expanded an alarming amount, had in fact merged into some obscene rendering of the MasterCard logo. The raisins he’d put on top had charred and looked not unlike dead flies dotting their surfaces. And they had apparently fused to the cookie sheets. 

Peter adjusted his angle on them, tried using a thinner spatula, and finally tried the same knife he’d been using, and he managed to at least get them off of the pan, albeit in several pieces. He was fitting them back together again when he heard a door open and close behind him followed, by footsteps. 

“Did you make soda bread?” Neal said.

Peter turned. He wasn’t sure if Neal's smile was an amused or surprised one. “Yes.”

Neal walked closer and looked down on the wrecked loaves – Peter noticed that one seemed unevenly browned, as if it had been half covered while in the oven. The other, by comparison seemed a bit burnt on the bottom. As he was looking at them, a large piece that he’d just shoved back onto the loaf on the left fell to the side and landed on the counter with a clatter.

“Did they put up a valiant fight?”

“They died with honor,” Peter replied. 

“Well, we should give them a proper burial.” Neal pulled out the butter dish from the fridge, took the fallen piece and slathered it with butter. Peter winced when Neal bit into it, expecting the worst.

“Not bad,” Neal said. 

“Really?”

“As far as you know.” 

\----

Oh look: A recipe

 

Thank you for your time.


End file.
